Andre Noll wrote:
On 11:04, Maarten wrote:
This weekend I promoted my new 6-disk raid6 array to production use and
was busy copying data to it overnight. The next morning the machine had
crashed, and the array is down with an (apparent?) 4-disk failure, as
witnessed by this info:
Believe it or not: The same thing (6-disk raid6, 4 disks failed)
happened also to me during this weekend.
Hehe. It doesn't get more scary than this.... ;-)
4) If it was only a one-drive failure, why did it kill the array ?
As others have already pointed out, this was not a one-drive
failure. In my case, the two SATA disks which are still functional
are connected to a 3ware controller while the four failed disks use
the onboard SATA controller [1]. Therefore I'm confident that this
is just a problem with the onboard SATA chip and that the array can
be assembled again after a reboot. I'll have to wait until the end
of the week to reboot that machine though.
Are you also using an Intel-based SATA chip (please send the output
of lspci -v)? Also, which kernel version are you using?
No, my chipset is a VIA one. Because the VIA SATA chips/drivers are
terrible, I use only SATA PCI cards with Sil chipsets. Believe it or
not I have good/excellent experiences with these. The driver is quite
stable, better than everything else I tried.
apoc log # lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8377 [KT400/KT600 AGP]
Host Bridge (rev 80)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI Bridge
00:07.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3114
[SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 02)
00:08.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3114
[SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 02)
00:09.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3114
[SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 02)
00:0a.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3124 PCI-X Serial
ATA Controller (rev 02)
00:0b.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8169
Gigabit Ethernet (rev 10)
00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc.
VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 ISA bridge
[KT600/K8T800/K8T890 South]
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage XL AGP 2X
(rev 65)
Linux apoc 2.6.23-gentoo-r3 #2 Fri Apr 25 11:09:37 CEST 2008 i686 AMD
Sempron(tm) 2200+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
5) Any insight as to how this happened / can be prevented in future ?
Don't use cheap hardware (Fast, cheap, good. Pick two) ;)
How true. In this case I think(or hope) I went for "cheap, good"...
Sixteen disks on 4 PCI slots (but still a single PCI bus!) is far from
fast indeed. ;-) I get a rebuild speed of 20436K/sec on a 5-disk raid5
array (SATA 250 GB disks), which is not terrible, but not fast either.
I'm considering a 8/12/16 port Areca controller but a few practicalities
hold me back: the price, and the fact I would need a PCI-X slot unless I
want to kill performance by a factor of 10. Also, the fact that I then
cannot use software raid anymore tends to scare me a little: You never
know how firmware reacts in the more 'interesting' circumstances, and
you lose control over it...
Maarten
Andre
[1] 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 631xESB/632xESB SATA
Storage Controller AHCI (rev 09)
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